Snap Inc. counted 4,723 full-time employees on June 30, 2026, down from 5,381 three months earlier. Between those dates, an April 15 restructuring affected about 1,000 team members. These Snapchat employee statistics cover quarterly headcount, layoff costs, median pay, team mix and hiring, drawn from Snap’s SEC filings, its newsroom and Revelio Labs workforce estimates. Snapchat Employee Statistics 4,723 Full-time employees at Snap on June 30, 2026, down 9% year over year. 16% Share...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Take Screenshot New Take Screenshot command ( CmdScreenshot ) in the Ctrl + k command palette captures the desktop and every visible window. An overlay shows thumbnails of the captures, labeled with process name and size. Pick one with the mouse or arrow keys and press Enter to save it as a PNG in the Screenshots folder of the SumatraPDF data directory. Default zoom for images The new ImageUI.DefaultZoom ...

The Chandrayaan 3 lander Vikram on the Moon, imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan on August 30, 2023. Image: ISRO On August 23, 2023 at 12:33 UTC, India’s robotic Chandrayaan 3 robotic lander completed the 19 minutes of its nerve-wracking autonomous descent to the Moon. In one piece and upright, it now lay near the lunar south pole at the coordinates 69.37°S, 32.32°E . The triumphant touchdown made India only the fourth nation to achieve the feat of a soft lunar landing, following the...

My blog began as a blosxom (Perl) site running on a VPS. In 2011 I moved to the new GitHub Pages , with the site generated statically by Jekyll (Ruby) on a GitHub server. It was a no-brainer: easier, faster, and cheaper, better in every way. After 15 years of Jekyll, this week I replaced it with a new, custom-built static site generator , dubbed ssg , in “C with templates” C++20. The ~8KLoC source closely follows my personal coding style including templated arenas and slices , zero...

This is a long-form written guide for the fight AAC Heavyweight M1 (Savage) in the game Final Fantasy 14, where the challenger and their seven friends fight the Elezen succubus Vamp Fatale. You may call this the XeBin guide in party finder listings. If you want to experience this fight, don't read this guide. This guide is based off of the Toxic Friends raidplan, the Hector Lectures strategies used by North America Party Finder raiding culture, and insights I have gained from running t...

For the past decade, every time I went up to the mountains here in my area, I got the chance to look at one particular mountain ridge standing there silently in the background. It spans roughly 30km, east to west. On one side, the Slovenian one, there’s the town of Kobarid. On the other, just more mountains. I’ve considered walking this ridge for years, every time making a different plan for how to tackle it. Some people do it in multiple days, sleeping either outside or in one of the va...

Earlier this week I asked a question on Mastodon: “Who are the Jane Goodalls and David Attenboroughs of software?” Goodall was a primatologist best known for decades of research on chimpanzees, and Attenborough has been making nature documentaries longer than I’ve been alive. Both are well-known to the general public (at least in the English speaking world) and have been powerful forces for good. Which means that the answer to my question is, “We don’t have any.” If you ask som...

"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë - good writing, but the protagonists are quite something. There's barely a likable character in the whole story - they are all either crazy, evil, stupid or a combination of these. It's also remarkable to consider how small the world of some people in those times was (pre-Victorian England); whole lives spent within a tiny area, interacting with a handful of other people. And that's for members of the nobility, not some bumpkin on a remote farm. "The Pickle...

We have many ways to ensure software quality. Unit testing. Fuzz testing. Integration testing. And so forth.   I’d like to propose a method that was unthinkable before: ephemeral testing . (Ephemeral is a fancy word for ‘throw away’ or ‘temporary’.)   You write your code. You build your software component. Or the AI agent does it for you, it does not matter.   Then you ask an AI agent to build on it: an application, another layer, maybe several. ...

This might seem odd for someone who hosts two podcast to say, but sometimes music really is better. I didn’t realise how much anxiety I was carrying around until I put on some of my smooth, upbeat jazz instead of the latest podcast episode when walking around, or sitting on the balcony this morning. I used to maintain a playlist of albums on my original iPod for reducing stress, especially around exam times, or when my late mum was due for a scan. I’d stopped listening to much of it, becau...

I want to give all my breath to the song, listening to every transcendent, liminal, spooky note, accompanied by intertwined tracks of coded and pure voice. I want to sing out the words I know loudly, and read all those I don’t know so that I may sing as much as I can with all the ardour in my heart and my soul, each vestige of passion entering the air being a sign of life, a sign of feeling, a sign of all that I have learned and all that I do not know. I listen to songs that I have heard dozen...

When working with floats, we tend to reuse the more familiar integer arithmetic patterns. More specifically, we always try to prevent a disaster rather than reacting to it. I keep noticing this pattern over and over again, and seeing that LLMs still get it wrong most of the time means that, either I am wrong, or everyone else is; it's obviously the latter, and I'm going to explain why. Integer arithmetic safety I wrote before about the issue with checking the result of integer arithmetic a...

The original idea was to kick off this article with a short list of complaints people have about async Rust. Y’know, the type you often see in the wild, justified or otherwise. I then realized that it’d easily be possible to find enough material riffing on async Rust to cover a whole bingo card, and that this would make for a much funnier format. The next time you see people arguing about async Rust, see if you can get a bingo! A 5×5 bingo card of common async Rust complaints....

The idea of “superpersuasion” has been floating around the AI safety community for decades. Now that powerful and difficult-to-control LLMs have appeared, people are again talking about the idea that a sufficiently intelligent AI might be able to persuade people to do whatever it wants. The classic 1 version of this idea is an AI persuading some engineer to “let it out of the box”: to grant it access to the internet. The modern version of this idea is t...

Building and testing the aircraft in the two states is projected to support about 9,800 American jobs by the early 2030s and add roughly $78 billion to the Newton and Seattle economies through 2046. NEWTON, Kan. and DES MOINES, Wash., (September 30, 2026) — Shield AI today named the two sites that will build and test X-BAT , its AI-piloted fighter jet designed to take off and land vertically. X-Forge 2, at the Newton City-County Airport in Kansas, is the flight test and sustainment home for...

0.0 Context setting Thursday 29 September in Portland, Oregon, where it is dreary but also not raining. Dreary kind of implies rain? Some sort of pregnantly dreary, I suppose. Gravid with rain but not raining yet. Anticipatory. It’s been just over a week since the last episode and I’ve got to say that every day that I haven’t written I’ve gotten more anxious about not having written. This is not generally speaking helpful because I don’t know about you, but it’s easier to writ...

In response to my last fragments (probably the bit about us worrying if LLMs have consciousness when we when we should be wondering why they don’t have a conscience) “Metalanguage” replied : we shipped the id and forgot the superego. classic software lifecycle. I don’t know what was on their mind, but their post immediately made me think of the classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. Plenty of sci-fi, and other literature, have explored humans creating technology with uninten...

I really enjoy writing. Not typing - writing . With a fountain pen on good quality paper. I find the whole process cathartic; putting pen to paper demands far more use of my grey matter than hammering away at a keyboard. I mentioned in a recent post that when I finished an English course many years ago, I was hunting for creative reasons to type. Similarly, over the last 6 months or so I've gotten into fountain pens, and now I'm looking for ways to write creatively. I thought about ha...

(This was written about 9 months ago.  Its not out of date... yet) People think that AI is going to DESTROY some job and CREATE some jobs. It may be to early to tell if this is true. Even so, here are some thoughts.  1) Who will win? Who will lose? 2) Historically in the long term society was better off after a tech change (e.g., we live longer now than we did in the farm-era). Will that happen here as well? 3) We have some sense of what kinds of jobs will be destroyed. But what kind will be c...

Annunciation with Saint Emidius, by Carlo Crivelli, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at a Senate permitting reform bill, the potential of Tesla’s Cybercab, the Navy’s $200 billion worth of shipyard renovations, a possible plan to return a SR-71 to service, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing...

Here's a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps . I'm talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say "after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors". These need to be hard limits. Soft caps, "after $X/month, send me a warning email", will not cut it. Coding agents, and personal agents (coding agents wrapped in a less threatening UI), greatly reduce the friction of s...

some strong feels as I try to navigate this. some strong feels as I try to navigate this. some strong feels as I try to navigate this. some strong feels as I try to navigate this.

Anthropic released new eval tooling for Claude Code . Their claude-api plugin now includes a new build_eval and hill-climb command that helps you build evals, check the graders, and improve your application against them. I usually don’t review eval tools because software changes so often that reviews have a short shelf life. But a first-party tool from Anthropic is likely to influence how people approach evals, so I wanted to try it and share what I found. Isaac Flath and I livest...